The Oregon Employment Department said Tuesday that the state amassed a seasonally adjusted 2,900 new jobs last month, on top of an upwardly revised 2,100 jobs in January. The unemployment rate, meanwhile, fell from 7.0 percent to 6.9 percent. It was the first time in 5½ years that the measure was lower than 7 percent.

Other signs also were promising: wages are finally starting to grow, and the labor force decline that accelerated in the recession is leveling off.

“All the employment statistics are pointing in the right direction now,” said Nick Beleiciks, an Employment Department economist. “In the past, we’ve seen mixed signals.”

The state has added more jobs than it lost for eight months running, and the unemployment rate has fallen by nearly a percentage point over that time.

Analysts expect those trends to persist, and the economy to keep growing at a modest rate through 2014.

“We are continuing this gradual recovery from the worst national recession in half a century,” said Joe Cortright, a Portland economist.

“We’ve seen the trends up and down, the good days and the bad days,” said Carie Strahorn, marketing director of Boly:Welch, which places workers in white-collar careers.

What’s coming back, Strahorn said, is the types of infrastructure jobs that were among the first to go when the economy collapsed. Businesses are starting to rebuild accounting and human resources divisions that were gutted, she said.

The growth has spurred Boly:Welch to do its own hiring, too. It brought on eight new employees within the last year, Strahorn said, expanding its workforce to 33 to meet growing demand. It moved to an office of 3,500 square feet to one 8,000 square feet.

Molly Kalomiris, the general manager of Portland-based Northwest Staffing Resources, agreed that office jobs are in increasingly high demand. The firm has a handful of offices throughout the West and focuses on temporary hiring. She said demand did not pick up as quickly as it did during past recoveries, but it feels more reliable as a result.

Temporary employees are finding permanent work around 30 percent of the time through the agency’s downtown Portland office, Kalomiris said, a rate about double what it was in the recession.

“Companies had downsized so much that the minute they got enough kick in business, they were scrambling,” she said. It took a long time before some are comfortable enough to hire full-time, she said.

Small businesses are also becoming more confident about bringing on new hires, said Jill Critchfield, a human resources consultant who runs Pacific HR in Portland.

“Really, I didn’t start getting calls about hiring for several years,” after the recession, she said. But a steady stream is now coming in, she said.

Employers statewide advertised 70,400 job openings online in February, up 5,200 from January, according to business research firm The Conference Board. Nearly three in five of the Oregon ads were new; the rest were left over from previous months.

Most of the actual hiring in February was concentrated in the private sector, with two industries in particular.

Oregon's construction and manufacturing industries added 1,100 seasonally adjusted jobs apiece, helping to counterbalance cuts to the leisure and hospitality sector. The industry, which includes restaurants, bars and hotels, shed 2,200 jobs last month after adjusting for normal seasonal factors.

Public agencies, for their part, posted a net gain of 1,000 jobs in February.

Job growth is helping to push down Oregon’s unemployment rate -- 8.1 percent a year ago -- to 6.9 percent.

Another factor behind the decline has been the falling share of adults in the workforce, which sped up in the recession. Economists have pointed to demographic and economic reasons behind the decline, but the latter appears to be leveling off as the job market improves, said Mark McMullen, the state economist.

The state's labor force participation rate, which declined through the recession and recovery, has steadily hovered near 61.2 percent for the past six months.

As jobs become less scarce, more workers seek them out, prompting some people who had been discouraged back into the labor force.

That also will present a challenge going forward for the economy, Cortright said. It takes more work on the part of employers and jobseekers to bring people who have been disconnected from the workforce back in.

About one-third of the unemployed have been out of work for at least six months, a share about three times as high as past norms, Beleiciks said. It is down from a recession-era high of 46 percent.

A different proxy of labor market health, known as the U-6 rate, is also declining. The measure counts people who are unemployed, or stuck in part-time jobs, or in and out of the labor market. It was stuck near 16 percent for several months, but edged down from 15.8 percent in January to 15.6 percent in February.

Private-sector wages, meanwhile, have climbed 3.2 percent in the past year, from an hourly average of $22.41 to $23.12. Beleiciks said the gains signal that the purchasing power of hourly earnings is now rising faster than the rate of inflation.